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 The great restorer
of chivalrous romance in modern Europe came of a martial Border
clan, the chiefs of which have founded in Scotland more than
one nble house. Walter Scott was the ninth son of an Edinburgh
solicitor, and was born in that city, August 1771. After a somewhat
irregular education, the youth, already brimful of poetry, ballads,
romances, and traditions of his warlike and loyal ancestors,
was admitted as an advocate at the age of 21. He studied law
with the same energy that he threw into all he took up, early
obtained some small legal appointments, and ultimately that of
Clerk of Session--an office which he filled with zeal and efficiency
for twenty-five years.
It is clear that from early youth Scott's real bent was towards
narrative romance, but his earlier publications were poems--Border
Minstrelsy (1802), Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805),
Marmion (1808), Lady of the Lake (1810)--which
gave him a reputation only overshadowed by that of Byron
a few years later. It was, however, not until the age of 43 that
the great romancer unveiled his true genius.
Waverley had been begun nine years earlier; but it
appeared anonymously in 1814; and from that date until Castle
Dangerous, in 1831, Scott continued, without much intermission,
to pour forth the magnificent series of historical romances,
in number more than thirty, which are his true glory. Along with
these he continued to issue poems, dramas, biographies, essays,
critical editions of various kinds, and almost every form of
literary product. Fired with the profits which such portentous
literary fertility gave him, and with his judgment dazzled by
the unparalleled popularity of his novels, Scott conceived the
petty ambition of founding a territorial family and creating
a baronial estate. He bought Abbotsford in 1812, and proceeded
to construct there a mesquin imitation of antique
mansion and park. He entered into partnership with publishers
and printers, and engaged in many foolish speculations; he was
made a baronet by the direct act of George IV; he kept open house
and lived the life of a county magnate. It is a sad and cruel
story. Ruin, humiliation, bankruptcy, disease, and death followed
in rapid series. For six years the poet struggled heroically
to meet his disasters; out of £130,000 of debts he paid
off £40,000 in two years of intense labour. His maladies
grew more acute, his genius feebler, with every new effort. He
died at the age of 61, utterly worn out by gigantic labours;
and he was buried in the romantic ruins of Dryburgh Abbey, beside
his beloved Tweed, September 1832.
It is one of the most melancholy thoughts in the history of
our literature that this superb genius was prematurely sacrificed.
For, with his splendid constitution and amazing fertility, the
world might have possessed another series of romances from his
brain not less inimitable than what we have. The historical field
is practically limitless; and the imagination of the great romancer
had an inexhaustible range, such as poets whose creations are
less objective could not possibly maintain. The errors of this
noble nature were inwoven with his whole conception of life.
But at bottom the soul of Walter Scott was true, generous, warm,
humane, and tender as any that ever spoke in immortal tones to
men. Some of his happiest creations have not been surpassed in
their own vein by Shakespeare
himself; some of his truest scenes have Homeric simplicity and
charm: his best tales have refashioned the historic judgment
of our age. The form in which the mighty improvisatore pours
out his story is too often flaccid, and at times it descends
to conventional bombast. Scott was no accurate historian, and
hardly a learned antiquary; and it may be that no one of his
novels is a complete masterpiece of the best that he could do.
Don Quixote, Tome Jones, even Manzoni's The
Betrothed are all more finished works of literary craft;
but the glory of the Waverley cycle is the Shakespearian
wealth of imagination, the historic glow which lights up, one
after another, eight centuries of the past, the unerring instinct
by which, in all its essentials, the spirit of Chivalry is revealed
to a sordid age.
These inexhaustible prose epics paint in everlasting hues
the best types of Medieval Chivalry and those late echoes of
it which linger in the Northern hills. And Scott does this with
a systematic completeness and a passionate enthusiasm which have
not been reached by the greatest masters of the historical drama.
The form and scheme of the prose romance are in many ways better
fitted to idealize the complex spirit of a distant epoch than
is the stage, whereon personal types must necessarily dominate
over social pictures. Scott has thus found a new mission for
the creative art--an art whereof he has given us the tempting
first-fruits, but which is destined to almost limitless development
and to the noblest uses when inspired by the religion of the
future.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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